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Friday, May 22, 2015

A Flawed Paradigm

Archaic humans were producing abstract symbols much earlier than originally thought. This shell found on Java in the late 1800s was carved half a million years ago by archaic humans. The zig-zag pattern is like that found on stone carvings in Africa. The pattern appears on the edge of the 77,000 year old red ochre stone found in the Blombos Cave in South Africa (image below).

Once again, Darwinians are snagged on their flawed paradigm. Darn those archaic humans! They keep throwing a wrench in the common ancestry theory. These folks apparently don't accept a basic principle of science: that a substantial body of empirical evidence should cause us to reconsider a flawed model of human origins.

Stone tools that are older than man have been found — suggesting that our ancient ancestors were already skilled toolmakers before they evolved into humans.

In a discovery which could rewrite the history books, archaeologists working in north-western Kenya found sharp cutting tools which date to 700,000 years before the first members of the genus homo emerged.

9 comments:

J Eppinga
said...

The criss-cross hatching fascinates me. Within my trade (finite-element simulation), there is an ongoing tension between the use of triangular (or tetrahedral for 3d) elements vs quadratic (or hexahedral, for 3d) elements. Triangular elements can describe most if not all geometries. Square elements are desireable for many reasons, but are not adaptable to describe many geometries.

Simply put, we can fill pretty much any surface exclusively with triangles. We can't do that with circles, nor squares, nor hexagons, etc (the latter two figures need to be truncated when they are at the edges of the surface).

It's not Finite Element Analysis, and it's not the Louvre, but it may be that these shell carving ancients noticed this feature of the triangle.

Are you aware of a zoological definition of 'animal' that includes recognition of geometric properties? :)

Pyramids, sacred mountains, and triangulation are dependent on recognition of something prior - two points, what we might designate a binary set: east-west; high-low, male-female, etc. - all observable in the order of creation. Triangulation represents greater complexity of thought. The binary feature of the human brain, not the size of the brain cavity, makes complexity of thought possible.

I couldn't make out the hatchings on the adornments. Might have missed that.

I take it that these are earrings? Most of them are topologically distinct from modern earrings, which open and close (I see one there that could be maneuvered onto an earlobe). This raises two technological questions - whether they had some form of wire (vegetation or metal) to affix the adornments, and how they drilled the holes. I knew a guy who claimed that he could drill a hole in a pane of glass. My other grandfather, a machinist, took him to task for that claim (a claim that I believe, btw).

Regarding the binary aspect of human cognitive ability, has there been a school that has promoted this since Structuralism's honeymoon ended?

The jewelry made from shells is clearly the work of human hands. Fully human.

Long before Structuralism, people recognized a binary feature in the order of creation. Jacques Derrida explored this extensively and noted that in narratives when a gender reversal takes place, the other becomes the dominant voice. Normally, the dominant voice is that of the Male Principle, but when the reversal takes place, the Female Principle is in action. There are many examples of this in the Old Testament.

Claude Levi-Strauss did not invent something with Structuralism. He studied primitive people groups and found that their worldview involved binary sets. His book "The Raw and the Cooked" presents this feature of archaic thought.

Here is more on that:http://jandyongenesis.blogspot.com/2012/04/levi-strauss-and-derrida-on-binary.html

Besides bicameral mind, the human line has other unique traits. Hairlessness and breath regulation are but two. What environment required these adaptations? I think it was a papyrus estuarine. I think the cross-hatch pattern is fish scales.